Mr. Moyachki

They were astonished when he was wheeled in, because they weren't prepared for the bright-blue eyes and the extreme whiteness of his skin. But most of all, they were surprised to find him so alive, so seemingly aware, for they had been told Mr. Moyachki lived in his own private world and never said anything to anyone anymore; yet there he was, number 28098, looking anything but inward, eyes darting about, blinking. And listening. Mr. Moyachki looked as if he would answer if any of them put a question to him, for new doctors were allowed to do that and in other years some had even tried to, but Mr. Moyachki never answered when they did. When they addressed him by name, all he did was sweat a little more. Sometimes he trembled. Or passed air. One year one of the new residents said he looked like a man waiting for the blindfold before his execution, and Dr. Humboldt wrote that in the record and even mentioned it as his own observation in ensuing presentations.

• • •

"What you're going to see," Dr. Humboldt had said, referring to a neatly typed case history in a folder, "is a man in his sixties, a man who was found wandering the streets in the Garment District after midnight about twenty years ago. He ran away when approached by police officers. He might not have been caught if he hadn't collided with a light standard as he was running around a corner." He paused.

"He was taken to Bellevue, where his condition was diagnosed as an acute and agitated anxiety state. A week later, he was transferred to Central Islip State Hospital on Long Island. Eighteen years ago, he was (continued on page 158) Mr. Moyachki (continued from page 152) brought here. He's been in the Davidson Building, Ward D, ever since. For your information, that's a back ward. For therapy he sees a doctor now maybe once a year. His state is one of classic manic-depressive psychosis that seems to have begun as a manic episode, deteriorated to malignant depression, and then to depressive stupor, where it has been arrested." He leafed through pages, found the one he wanted. "The official diagnosis is catatonic schizophrenia."

The new residents stirred. Humboldt paused while a late arrival came in and said, "Excuse me, doctor." Humboldt eyed him coldly. Other doctors turned, not so much to see the new arrival as to ogle once again Coralee Swithers, a busty, blonde-haired resident appointee who defied tradition and wore a miniskirt. Coralee smiled appreciatively. Everybody settled down.

"Was he hurt when he hit the light pole?" a redheaded resident at the rear of the room asked.

"Nothing to indicate he was," Humboldt said tiredly, "except for a bump on the head."

"Organic brain syndrome," a thin young man in the front row ventured.

"It would be hard to say, since no one knew the patient's natural or usual behavior."

"Subdural hematoma?" Coralee volunteered brightly.

"No. You should know he started to run when he saw the police officers, and when he was caught he talked a blue streak."

"What did he say?"

"Nothing that made any sense. Someone on the service reported he thought he was speaking in tongues."

"Any identification?"

"None."

"General adaptation syndrome."

"Who said that?"

"I did," said one of the residents in the middle of the group. "He was in alarm reaction when he saw the police, the stage of resistance when they caught him, and he quickly progressed to a stage of exhaustion, where he's been ever since."

"What's your name?" Humboldt asked.

"Savery. Matthew Savery."

"Doctor, would you like to work with this man?"

"I don't know," Savery said. "I haven't even seen him yet."

"Is that a prerequisite?"

"Is it, doctor?"

There was a vacuum. In it some of the residents laughed a little self-consciously. Then Humboldt smiled and the tension evaporated.

• • •

The man they had taken to calling Mr. Moyachki was wheeled in, and Moyachki thought, Well, at least it's something different, not the dreary ward but a brighter place and the usual number of blurred faces and the big man with the walrus mustache and the folder in his hand. They would look at him, the big doctor would gesture to him and they'd talk. He wished he understood what they were saying, but he'd been wishing that for years and it hadn't done any good.

Once, he had understood everybody, had understood everybody for years. Then one day he woke up and it was as if everybody were speaking a foreign language. Something had gone wrong in his brain, just like with all the people he saw around him. They had deliberately made him that way because of what he'd done with the sausages. He was crazy. He'd been crazy for ... it bothered him that he did not know for how long he'd been crazy. He squirmed in the wheelchair. He hated the damn thing. Why did they insist he sit in it when he came into this lecture room? What good did it do them to look at him, poke him, prod him, talk to him, make fun of him? He was tired of it. But of course there was no way out.

Why had they taken his glasses so long ago? What was it they didn't want him to see? Why wouldn't they let him have them for even a little while? What did they really want of him?

If only I could see clearly, he thought. Then I could better bear up under all this, even though I am bearing up under it.

• • •

"Aphasia," one resident said.

"Agraphia," said another.

"Of course he can't talk," Humboldt said with a degree of disgust. "Or won't talk." He glared at the eager faces. "As for agraphia...." He turned to Moyachki and smiled a bit ruefully. "Mr. Moyachki's an artist, aren't you, Mr. Moyachki?"

Moyachki blinked at the walrus mustache. He could barely make out the white teeth behind the patronizing smile.

"Why, sir?" a resident asked. "Why do you say that?"

"He finger-paints on walls in solitary with fecal matter," Dr. Humboldt said as if he were proud of it.

"What did he paint?" Coralee wanted to know.

"Shit," said the redheaded resident.

Everybody laughed, including Dr. Humboldt, who then fixed the young man with a stare. "Maybe you'd like to try your luck with this patient, doctor."

The resident said uncomfortably, "What can you do with a catatonic?"

"You can keep your mouth as shut as he keeps his," Humboldt said.

There was, of course, more laughter.

• • •

The man they called Moyachki closed his eyes and remembered, immersing himself in the quiet loveliness of the river in the smoke-colored autumn. Did it still freeze over most of the winter? His mind drifted to the breathless beauty of ballet and Chopin crisp and clear, breath-holding, and everybody an aristocrat in the big concert hall. And then there were other days, holidays in the park, dust motes dancing in the afternoon sun, bearded old men playing chess, young lovers spellbound on the grass, old ladies in long coats feeding the pigeons with seeds they withdrew from brown paper bags and threw to the winds. There were the squat little fishing boats, the long barges, sea gulls soaring and dipping and forever hungry, dashing waves and rain and thick clouds. Yes, there was all of that, and it still lives, it must still be. Beyond these walls.

Then there was the prison. Warmth leached from Moyachki as the recollection of locker-white walls and lone light bulbs in ceilings crept along his veins like refrigerated embalming fluid and made him shiver. But at least those in the prison had understood him, and he had understood them. The guards, he could talk to them. The doctors, he could tell them how he felt; they always wanted to know how he felt. Now he knew why.

"How do you feel this morning?" they'd ask when they came to his room in the infirmary.

He'd been arrested because he'd been hungry, he'd had too much to drink and he thought no one would miss the sausages he stuffed into his overcoat pockets. He was only going to take them home to Irina; maybe they had some wine left and would celebrate because he was feeling so good, he couldn't remember.

But they had taken him away, the uniformed men had. The store manager had made him stay until the police came. They took him to that awful place, the prison with its 12-foot-thick walls, and they wouldn't let him get a word to Irina. When he asked why, they shrugged, said they were sorry, but somebody was going to have to serve as an example, there had been too many thefts from stores, mostly food, and this was setting a bad precedent, people would begin thinking they didn't have to work anymore, just go into stores and pick up what they needed without paying. It had to be stopped. Then they had taken his picture and put it in the paper. They showed it to him. He was a common criminal. No wonder his wife never came to see him!

Endless days, hours strung out in quiet agony until the real pain, the day he'd had his first headache. Then the days ran quickly together and the pain became worse. Excruciating. That is when he was taken to the infirmary: when he could no longer stand up but just lie on his bunk, rolling and moaning and not caring what they did with him because he was so sick and wanted to die.

The doctors seemed glad to see him, kept nodding their heads and rubbing their hands together.

"What's wrong with me?" he gasped.

A doctor, one young enough to be his son, said, "A neoplasm," but an older doctor said gently, "A tumor. A brain tumor."

And when he said. "Am I going to die?" the old doctor said, "We're going to try an experiment," and they injected him with something. Gradually, the pain went away.

It was then that he knew they were lying. No one recovers from a brain tumor. They were experimenting on him. First, something in his food, then the pain, then the injections. He'd heard such things happened in prisons.

He should have known. He began to feel good. Better than good. And everybody was so cheerful and happy and considerate. Was that because of what they were planning for him? Or was it because they were feeling sorry for him because he was going to have to go back to those narrow, dank halls, the dingy cells, the place of fetid smells, the place where the rats were? They were smiling and telling him what a lucky man he was, and they kept taking his blood pressure and samples of his urine and blood.

He could not stand to wait and see. He would escape, that is what he would do. He's do it before he went back to the main prison, for there was no way out of there, but in the infirmary it was different; there were fewer guards and he had a lot of freedom. He could walk to the solarium, to the dayroom, stroll the bright, sunlighted corridors and nod at people and stop to look out the windows at the beautiful city. It would be easy.

It was.

• • •

"He closes his eyes," red hair said. "Why does he do that?"

"Why don't you ask him?"

"Mr. Moyachki"--whereupon Moyachki opened his eyes--"why do you close your eyes?"

Savery said, "He closes his eyes because he can't stand the sight of you."

Dr. Humboldt broke into the laughter to say, "A primitive psychosomatic language. We all do it: Shutting out the world, it's called. You'll see a lot of that here."

"By the staff?" Someone said, but nobody acknowledged it, though Humboldt ran his eyes over all the faces.

"Irrelevant language," Savery said, leaning forward and staring straight into Moyachki's eyes.

"Follow that," Humboldt said, interested.

Savery considered it. "You said he talked once, but the words, phrases and utterances had no meaning. Perhaps they had meaning to Mr. Moyachki. Has anyone thought of that?"

"How many schizophrenics have you listened to?" Humboldt asked.

"I've listened to a lot of autistic children and hebephrenic teenagers in a children's hospital."

"Then you know it's all their creation. They invent their world and they live in it, close you out. Each is safe in his own delusional system. Their talk, if any, is armor plate."

"More like a portcullis," Savery said.

"Exactly."

But Savery wasn't satisfied. "It puzzles me that Mr. Moyachki spoke once but doesn't speak anymore."

Coralee Swithers said, "Dr. Humboldt, you stated his first words were jerky, explosive and irregular. Couldn't that be asynergic or ataxic speech?"

"Of course," Dr. Humboldt said with a wry smile and a glance at her pretty legs. "You've been studying."

"I won't deny it."

"Well, we thought of a disease of the cerebellum, Dr. Swithers, yes, we did that. But it was negative."

Savery said, "How did he react to the examination?"

"He didn't like it."

"Would you say he overreacted?"

"Yes."

"Any idea why?"

"No. Do you have a guess?"

"No," Savery sank back, as baffled as the rest.

"For a moment," Dr. Humboldt said dryly, "I was expecting a miracle. Do any of you believe in miracles?"

• • •

Moyachki closed his eyes again and went back 20 years to the infirmary, to the solarium where, during one of his days, he unlocked a window. He was surprised to find it unlocked the next day. And the next.

Finally, he exited through it at night, dropping to the ground 20 feet below, being thankful he'd had sense enough to bend his knees. As it was, he hit his chin on his knees when he landed, nearly breaking his neck. He rolled, then lay silent for a long time, letting noises of the night come into him: the murmur of traffic, faraway voices, bells and insect sounds. He looked up at the stars, expected a head to come poking out of the window he'd just dropped from. At last he got up, was surprised to find that he could stand, walked through wet grass to the sidewalk. No trouble at all getting his bearings from the sky and the first bridge he came to. No question where the piers and the ships lay: on the island. And so he moved through mist, crossed the canal and moved along the river when he came to it and crossed to the island. There would be a ship there, a big one, a ship that would carry him from here to a place that would sparkle in the sun and be warm, where the maidens would be dusky, as he'd once read they were, and danced naked on the sand, and followed you to wherever you wanted to take them, their long, black hair shifting lazily in the tropical breeze. The fall and the sudden freedom had made him giddy.

It was a midnight walk along the embankment, his breath visible, cold seeping into him. It was a walk such as lovers might take, and he took warmth in it. Wasn't he with a lover? The figment of his favorite dancing girl?" Not the pristine prettiness of the ballerinas but the sultry wanting-to-please brown-eyed beauties who could not take their eyes off him, girls who waited for him at the end of the world.

He was so lost in thoughts of faraway places that he was on the island before he knew it, and there in her berth was the ship for him, a forbidding, dark shape as tall as a building.

He approached from the stern past the name Jalokivi illuminated by a lone light high on a post near a dockside crane and not thinking about it, only about the fact that it was a ship, that it was there and he would be aboard her soon. Moving cautiously, he came amidships to the gangway steps. He stood for a moment to listen, heard nothing unusual, started up toward the light at the top. There would be someone there, of course.

His eyes came level with the deck. He could see two sailors standing nearby, talking in low tones. He stayed where he was until one yawned and the other slapped him jovially on the back and pushed him toward a companionway. The watch sailor darted a glance toward the gangway before quickly moving down the steps to follow the other sailor.

Moyachki waited a moment, then darted up to the deck, explored and found an open hatch. In less than a minute he had hidden himself among crates in the freight hold. After his racing heart slowed to normal, he fell asleep to dream about endless stretches of white sand, blue lagoons and grass huts wherein he dwelt and was visited whenever he wished by any number of soft, brownskinned girls with flowers in their hair.

• • •

When the man who would later be called Moyachki came to his senses, he thought he was back in the infirmary and that they had done something terrible to him, because he couldn't see. Then he knew he was somewhere else, because the smells were different, the room was different, the doctors were different. When he had the strength, he put his hand up to his eyes. His glasses were gone.

"My glasses," he said with alarm. "I need my glasses."

Nils Ladoga, medical officer of the Jalokivi, a freighter of Finnish registry, heard him, came to look down at him. "So you can speak, can you? Well, save your strength. You are still pretty dehydrated." He took out the I.V.s that had been keeping Moyachki alive.

Moyachki had been frightened at the hospital. Now, being somewhere else and seeing nothing but a series of depressing blurs and the vague face of Nils Ladoga saying something he did not understand, he became more frightened than ever. What had they done to his brain? Where was this? He squinted and tried to sit up in the sick bay.

"Easy, now," Ladoga said, pushing Moyachki down. "You rest."

Moyachki was nauseated and weak. This was worse than the prison infirmary. There he could at least see and there he could understand what was being said. What they had done to him was to take his glasses away and render his brain twisted and incapable of understanding words.

His heart commenced jackhammering and only with great effort of will was he able to force himself to relax. He was so successful he even closed his eyes and slept. When he opened them, he did so only to narrow slits. He saw nothing moving among the blurs. He blinked and sat up. Nothing. He swung his legs off the table. He was weak and felt near collapse, but he made himself sit up until he felt halfway normal, then he got off and stood, swaying, dizzy. He had to get out of there.

He moved slowly up the companionways until he reached the deck, found it was still night out and wondered how that could be; surely more hours had passed than that. He stopped, listened, Not a sound. The ship was not rocking or rolling, its engines were not running, so it had not yet moved out. He started across the deck to the bulwarks and, with his hand on the rail, stepped toward where he thought the gangway would be, stumbling sometimes, moving around equipment he saw only as blurred, dark hulks, always coming back to the railing, until he finally came to the break and the dockside steps.

"Hey--you!" The cry came from some distance away and he heard the sound of feet pounding on the deck. He did not understand the words, but there could be no doubt of what the words meant.

Moyachki started down the gangway as fast as his feet would go, and when he reached the solidity of the wood of the pier, he ran toward the lights.

Later, he wandered about streets looking for the canal. He was sure he would be able to find it even though he was without his glasses, but before he was able to, he ran into the police. There was no mistake about these men who suddenly loomed before him. They reeked of authority, of menace, of danger.

"What are you doing here?"

He did not like the sound of the voice, veered away from them. They reached for him. He began to run fast down the street, hearing their shouts, the soles of their shoes slapping the pavement. Moyachki did not see the light standard in time, because, as he rounded the corner, he turned to look behind him and was pleased to see nothing, though he could still hear them coming. When he turned back, there was the pole and he collided with it. It sent daggers of light to piercing his brain, shattering into myriad fragments as he fell unconscious to the sidewalk.

• • •

Moyachki, after having been treated for the bump on his forehead, was taken to a small cubicle and left with a man in a white smock who sat at a table and motioned for him to sit down. Moyachki was better able to see the motion than he was the man's arm.

"Hello," the man said cheerfully.

Moyachki stared at him. This man spoke like the rest, he was probably a doctor and very learned, and Moyachki knew now with crushing despair that whatever words he would hear in the world, he would never understand them.

"What day is this?" the man said.

Moyachki shook his head. Maybe they would understand him if he spoke. "I want my eyeglasses, please."

"Do you know where you are?"

"Please, my eyeglasses. I can't do anything without my eyeglasses. I can only see that you are a face, nothing more. I will behave, if only you will return my eyeglasses. I'm sorry for all I've done and I'll obey all the rules. You see, something's happened to my brain, they've done something to it and I don't understand what people say anymore."

"Is it raining outside?" And when Moyachki started in again about how much he needed his eyeglasses, the doctor said, "Let me put it another way: Was it raining when you were brought in?"

"My eyeglasses, please. I beg you."

"What is your name?"

"My eyeglasses," Moyachki said without hope as the doctor began to write something down.

• • •

The first day he ran about, shouting, "My eyeglasses, I need my eyeglasses! Can't anybody understand? My eyeglasses, please, I beg you! My eyeglasses, please!" But he knew it was useless.

They put him in restraint and filled him with chlorpromazine and abruptly his eyeglasses weren't important anymore.

Because he could not see clocks, he had to rely on his inner time sense to tell him when to join lines of silent people who shuffled up to nursing carts to receive paper cups of liquid. He did not care anymore what it was. He drank the Thorazine.

He ambled about in loose-fitting garb, the blue pajama pants and top and white cloth slippers, all with Bellevue stenciled on them.

Then he was transferred to another place with a lot of other prisoners. And after an indeterminate period there--since he could not read calendars, he did not know how long it was--he was transferred to still another place. This one.

It was here that he decided to end his miserable life.

The reason was, though he could not see anything in any detail, he did see attendants choke an old man who never stopped singing at the top of his voice. They choked him into silence and, finally, in their anger, into death.

Then there was the bald-headed man who kept standing up in bed, shouting, lecturing. He wouldn't stop even when Moyachki went up to him and said, "Stop it or they'll choke you if you don't, don't you realize that? They'll choke you to death."

The man paid him no attention. The attendants came in, tied the man down, and when the man gnawed through the ropes and stood up and started his harangue again, they put him in a strait jacket; he couldn't speak, because he kept spitting at the flies that kept gathering around his mouth.

They wanted to use Moyachki, so they sent him to the kitchen to work, but he kept bumping into things, knocking them over. "Listen, pinhead," the cook said, "you break one more thing, I'll see it's the hole for you."

When he inadvertently dumped over a whole tray of dishes after he stumbled into a cart, he was taken away, stripped of his clothes and put in a small, chilly solitary-isolation cell that contained only a ceiling bulb and a mattress on the floor. At first he ran around the mattress, shouting for his glasses. Then he thought how much like the man in the bed he was being, so he quieted and wrote on the wall in big letters instead.

Two weeks later he was taken out, put in a shower, given a new set of pajamas and slippers and taken before another man in a white smock, a man with a walrus mustache.

"I'm Dr. Humboldt."

"My eyeglasses. Please."

"Do you know where you are?"

"My eyeglasses!"

"Do you know what day it is? What year? Do you know who the President of the United States is?"

Moyachki cried inside. What was the use of living if he couldn't see anything? Even if they set him free, what good would it do to walk through sunny streets, through the park, and not see the people, the clouds, the trees, the lovers, the freshly mowed grass, the old ladies and men, and the flowers swaying in the breeze in their beds along the parkway?

He broke open a medicine cabinet at a nurse's station and was in the middle of gulping down all the medicine in the bottles when attendants rushed him and pulled him away, the nurses screaming in fright.

They pumped his stomach.

He did not ask for his glasses.

He was put in solitary for a month.

(continued on page 166) Mr. Moyachki (continued from page 162)

He did not ask for his glasses.

He went on a fast. He would fast until the end.

They came in, took him to another room, tied him down on a table, forced a tube into his stomach, put a funnel at the other end and let gruel flow down.

"You can't starve here, Mr. Moyachki," Humboldt said. "We won't let you. Every other day it will be food down the tube. The choice is yours." This doctor with the mustache came around to look down at him. "I imagine you don't care much for this, do you, Mr. Moyachki?"

He gave up the fast.

He also gave up talking. He would speak no more.

• • •

Humboldt told them, "Mr. Moyachki was not always as weak and submissive as you see him today. He just seemed to cave in one day. If you had him, Dr. Savery, what would you do with him?"

Savery, whose sun-tanned face was a study, said, "I don't know. It's a puzzle. There's something strange here." The other residents laughed and Coralee tittered. Some of the residents used the occasion to dart admiring glances to her. Savery went on, "He can't understand."

"Sensory aphasia," said a resident who wanted to make points. "Plus anarthria."

Savery, who had stood first in his class in medical school and had made waves as a medical intern, said with heavy sarcasm, "OK, let's drag it all out, all the jargon. Sure, he can't talk. But maybe he doesn't want to talk. He's given up. So let's be technical and call it lalophobia and say he's afraid of talking. Does that make everybody happy?"

"Dr. Savery," Humboldt said severely, "I must ask----"

"Is there any paralysis?" Savery interrupted.

"You mean of the speech muscles?"

Savery nodded wearily. "Yes, of the speech muscles. Laloplegia, if you want me to say it. I've studied, too, you know."

"What's your point, doctor?"

"I think it must be simpler than it appears, that's all."

"Is that a fact?" Humboldt said dryly. "Then how would you explain eighteen years of his being a patient without any bright young doctor like you discovering this 'simplicity' you seem so sure about?"

"You say he doesn't communicate."

"You can see that for yourself."

"Yet you said he wrote on a wall."

"In broad, smelly strokes, if you want to be factual."

"What did he write on the wall?"

"Are you trying to make a fool out of me, doctor?"

"I'm asking you a serious question."

"The hospital should immoratalize words written in excrement by a crazy man?" Humboldt fairly bristled. "Is that what you're implying?"

"It's a form of communication, doctor."

"The attendant who looked through the peephole and saw him doing this was rewarded with some of it in his eye."

"Mr. Moyachki did that?"

"He certainly did."

"Then you know what he thinks of the attendant and probably the hospital itself."

"Dr. Savery, why don't you give us the benefit of your infinite wisdom and tell us what you're driving at."

"I say this man is sane."

Humboldt looked at him for a long moment. "I would like you to prove that, doctor."

Savery said, "I can't. At least not right now."

"How long do you think it would take?"

"I don't know. I just have a felling. Call it intuitive validity, if you want. There's just something about him, that's all."

Addressing the residents, Dr. Humboldt said, "The genius residing in Dr. Savery is going to unravel for us in the next few months--or will it be days, doctor?--what we have been trying to unravel for years."

At that moment there was a commotion at the door and Dr. Harold Lindgren, head of the service, who had opened the door without ceremony, ushered in three people. Humboldt, who would have been outraged had it not been Lindgren, was nonetheless put out at this disruption and seemed on the verge of saying so, having more than tenure, but Lindgren was acting strangely. He brought the three persons--a woman and two men, who were dressed rather severely--to the lectern and introduced them to Humboldt and the residents as if they were royalty:

"Dr. Maria Bassinov, a director of the Serbsky Institute for Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow; Dr. Nikolai Paskar, head of the special hospital at Chernyakhovsk; and Dr. Axel Chelny, chief of research at the Institute of Psychology of the Georgian Academy of Sciences."

Dr. Humboldt was impressed and shook their hands as Lindgren explained to the visitors his position in the hospital and, in answer to Humboldt's questioning gaze, explained in turn that the Russians were touring mental-health facilities in the United States as guests of the Government.

The residents sat in quiet expectation. Moyachki blinked his eyes and showed interest as the three Russians turned their attention to him.

Humboldt said, "We were in the middle of a case presentation here." He pointed to Moyachki. "Eighteen-year schizophrenic. Moyachki."

Maria laughed easily. "Your pronunciation, doctor. And you have them on. Have you been studying Russian long?"

"I beg your pardon?"

Dr. Paskar eyed her severely and said to her, "Ne smeites' nad amerikantsami kotorie izuchaiut nash iazik." ("You should not make fun of Americans if they are trying to learn our language.")

Dr. Chelny, with a glance at Humboldt, said, "Mne kazhetsia shto vy ego obideli." ("I think you hurt his feelings.")

Moyachki jumped from the wheelchair, faced them excitedly. "Ia vas ponimaiu! Ia vas ponimaiu!" ("I can understand you! I can understand you!")

Maria said, "On govorit po russki!" ("He speaks Russian!")

"Konechno ia govoriu po russki. Ia russki. Ia rodilsia i vyros v Leningrade kogda on escho byl Petrograd." ("Of course I speak Russian. I am a Russian. I was born and raised in Leningrad when it was Petrograd.")

The residents stared as Moyachki began to sob his relief, taking in great gulps of air, putting his hands to his face. Humboldt and Lindgren didn't know what to do. The Russian visitors were visibly moved. Moyachki said, "I kept asking for my glasses. I kept saying 'Moiochki' over and over and that's why they call me Moiochki."

Dr. Chelny said crisply, "What is your name?"

"My name is Michael Pimen."

Maria said to Humboldt, "This man has been here eighteen years?"

Humboldt, numbed by the revelations, nodded dumbly.

"He must be released at once," Dr. Paskar said with some authority. "He is a Russian subject."

Maria said she wanted to know how Pimen came to be their charge and Humboldt haltingly explained it, trying to make everyone involved look good.

"Get me out of here," Pimen said. "And please, my eyeglasses!"

• • •

"But don't you see," Maria Bassinov said excitedly, waving the sheaf of papers in her hand, "you're an important man. You're important to every man wherever he lives--in Russia, the United States--it doesn't matter where."

Michael Pimen sat luxuriating in the softness of a lounging chair in the main room of the hotel suite, not excited at all. It was enough to be away from the hospital, to be away from the plastic cups that contained the liquid that dulled his mind, his senses. His brain, after years of numbing drugs, had come alive again. He was not the same man; those years were behind him. They said they were taking him back, and he was frankly worried about that, but for now, in the cool room with the whispering air conditioning....

"Tell me about the Krasnaia Strela," he said. "Is it still running?"

"Yes, yes," Maria said impatiently, "the Red Arrow still eases into the Moskovskii? Voksal the way it always did. The train is as luxurious as ever. But--"

"Do they still play the hymn in the station?"

"Yes."

It was Glière's Hymn to the City and Michael loved it. When he heard it on the public-address system, he couldn't get it out of his head for days.

"They certainly play it loud enough," Maria said absently. Then she moved to him. "You had a brain tumor. Do you remember that?"

"I could not have had a brain tumor."

"But we checked and you did. You volunteered to be a guinea pig--you and twenty-seven others with cancers of one kind or another."

Michael wondered what she looked like, really. She had a very nice voice. Very soft, very warm. Unlike those at the hospital. Soon he would have his glasses. They had taken him to a New York optometrist who understood Russian. Yes, soon Nikolai and Axel would be back with his eyeglasses. "Moi ochki," he would say as he took them. He had to smile at the thought. After all these years....

"And," Maria was saying, "you were administered the Plasskov serum. That was Dr. Plasskov who was working on you when you decided to run off. Didn't you know that?"

"Serum?"

"For a horse, actually. It works on the reticulo-endothelial system. It annihilated your brain tumor, comrade. Yours and yours alone. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

Michael sighed. "When will they return with my eyeglasses?"

"Any minute now." Maria walked to the windows, put the papers on the table between them. "Why did you do what you did? Didn't you trust Dr. Plasskov?"

"I would have been sent back to prison when I was cured. What did it matter?"

"That is not true. You would have become a celebrity--what you are now in the eyes of the Central Committee. They have heard about you, you know." She came to him, put a hand on his shoulder. "What happened inside your body to kill the cancer is important to all of mankind. You will be given a medal."

"What happened to the others?"

"I don't understand."

"The other ... twenty-seven."

"The other volunteers? It didn't work on them. They died. That's why what happened to you is--"

"So important. Yes, I know. That's what you say." They had been feeding him well and he felt strong again. He was lucky. He had been lucky all along.

Maria fiddled with the papers on the table. "The report says you jumped out of the hospital window and fled into the night. They expected to find you dead when the others began to drop off, except that when the Jewel reached New York----"

"The Jewel?"

"The Finnish ship--the Jalokivi--the ship you were on. You were in the freight hold for nearly two weeks, unconscious, overcome by fumes from cargo chemicals. It's lucky that you didn't die."

Yes, he'd been lucky. And that is why he hadn't understood....

"Then, when they fed you intravenously and you got your senses back, you ran out and off the boat and wandered about the city of New York."

Michael smiled wryly. "I thought this was Leningrad. I thought I'd been on the ship only that night. No wonder I wasn't able to find the Obvodny Canal."

"Or the Fontanka River."

"I survived."

"Yes, you did that. You have done that."

"I thought the police...."

"That is understandable," Maria said quietly. Then, coldly, "What is not understandable, however, is the idiocy of the people here. Isn't there anyone here who understands Russian?"

"Oh, yes. There was a man--two men. One was a Muscovite and he sang songs at the top of his voice and----"

"Didn't you talk to him?"

"I tried to, but he wouldn't stop singing."

"What happened to him?"

"They choked him to death."

"And the other man?"

"He would stand up in his bed, lecturing. He was one of the volunteers for the Opolchenie--the People's Army who defended Leningrad----"

Maria said stiffly, "I am aware of the heroes of Leningrad, comrade. My uncle--but never mind. Couldn't you talk to him?"

"I tried to. I told him what they did to the other Russian, but he never stopped his shouting about how they all died before the westward advance toward Berlin, how horrible it was, the famine, how they all had allotted to them seven bullets a day."

"A rifleman, no doubt. What happened to him?"

"They tied him down, he bit through the ropes, they put him in restraints and he finally died."

Maria snorted. "Because they did not want him reciting the glories of the People's Army, no doubt."

There was a silence. Michael said, "Have you any word of my wife, Irina?"

"Dead."

"They questioned her, I suppose."

"Of course they questioned her. Would you not do the same?"

Irina was a shadowy figure now buried deep in the crevices of his brain. He could not even remember the color of her eyes. He wondered how she had died.

• • •

Nikolai Paskar and Axel Chelny came back to the hotel and entered the suite, Paskar carrying the new glasses in their case. They made Michael sit near the window while they put them on and adjusted them for him.

Instantly for Michael the air that had hung outside the windows like a mist became clear and he could see everything, including the building across the street, the dark smoked glass of the windows, very strange for windows.

They made him stand up and look down, and he beheld, far below, variously colored insects crawling in orderly rows down pathways, stopping at other intersecting pathways, momentarily, then starting up again. He realized they were automobiles, and he was overcome by the sight, by the clarity with which he could see them, by the fact that man had created all this, that he was part of it, that he should be so high above them and still be safe and cool.

He sank back to his lounge chair, his chin quivering, his eyes wet. A tear rolled out and down his cheek and for a moment, before he blinked his eyes, he was seeing the world through a mist again.

Then there was Maria and she was standing before him. He was hypnotized by the young sweetness of her face, the blue black of her eyes, the pores he could now see, her full lips.

"What do you think?" Nikolai Paskar asked jovially. "What do you think, eh, Michael?"

When he looked at the men and saw how severely they were looking at him, he thought: NKVD. When they saw his face darken, Paskar asked, "What is it, Michael Pimen? What is wrong?"

"NKVD," Michael said miserably. "You're NKVD."

There was a hush. And then Maria moved even closer, turned his face to hers, smiled wanly. "There is no more NKVD, Michael."

"I don't believe you." He had to say it.

"It's been changed to the MVD." Then she blinked at him, said sharply, "But it has nothing to do with you. We are not MVD. We are scientists. Doctors. We will take you back, yes, but not to prison. You will return a hero, as I've told you. You must believe, Michael."

"Michael Pimen," Axel Chelny said gently, moving to stand beside Maria Bassinov, "what has happened to you has happened to no other man. We must find out why. We must find out how so we can make it happen to others. Do you understand?"

He didn't believe them or care much about what they were talking about. They didn't talk like NKVD. Maybe they were right. His eyes strayed to the window and he got up to look out. "I want to go down there," he said.

"No," Nikolai said. "We can't take a chance like that."

"You must stay here in this suite," Maria said. "We are all flying back in the morning."

So he was a prisoner.

Or maybe he wasn't. Maybe they were right, nothing would happen to him when they got back. But he had to get down there. He had to see this world before he left it, this world he had never seen. But he knew better than to ask permission. He'd wait. Maybe in the night, when they were asleep, he'd go out, see it all, if it was possible.

• • •

It was after midnight and it was cold and The Turtle was about ready to tell Honest John it was a waste of time, nobody would be dumb enough to enter Central Park at this hour, there were other places. He knew what Honest John would say. He would tell him there were a lot of dumb people in the world. And he'd be right. The Turtle rubbed his hands together, did a couple of deep knee bends before Honest John, who could hear what others could not, banged him on the shoulder and made him quit.

The Turtle stopped and looked to where Honest John was pointing. They saw an old man, a man in his 60s maybe, coming up the path, looking around as if it were the first day of spring. What could he be thinking of? How dumb could you get?

They waited until he came up to where they were, then Honest John simply stepped out from the bushes to take his stand behind the man, putting the knife to his throat. "Not one word, baby," Honest John said. "Not one word."

The Turtle saw the man's eyes behind the glasses. They were wide and bulging with fear. His mouth kept opening and closing as he breathed hard. The Turtle made his search quick and neat but found absolutely nothing on the man, in his coat, in his pockets, no jewelry, not anything. He was surprised.

The man twisted away unexpectedly, something they never did. Honest John took a couple of steps and grabbed him again, pushing the blade hard against the throat. "That wasn't very nice, old man. Not nice at all." Honest John was mad.

"He's got nothing," The Turtle said. "Nothing at all. Nothing anywhere."

"Nothing? What do you mean, nothing?" Honest John was fit to be tried, The Turtle could see that.

The man started squirming. Honest John was so annoyed he batted the stranger on the head, sent him flying, glasses sailing into the grass. They watched the old man get to his hands and knees.

"Moi ochki," the man said, patting the area around him, searching, then looking toward them. Next, he screamed it: "Moi ochki!"

That was when Honest John had to finish him off.